I'm Olivia, a PhD student in neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh, where I spend my days asking questions that most people don't even know to ask, like why the same injury can feel completely different depending on your biology, or what your immune system is doing when your pancreas decides to become your worst enemy.

My research sits at the intersection of pain, inflammation, and the nervous system, with a particular focus on how sex shapes the way we experience visceral pain. Specifically, I study the pancreas-to-periphery connection: tracing how signals from an inflamed pancreas travel through the nervous system and why that journey looks different depending on who's making the trip. In practice, that means a lot of time with mice, microscopes, flow cytometers, and the kind of data that takes months to generate and about thirty seconds to make a committee member raise an eyebrow. I genuinely love this work, which I'm told is either a great sign or a bad one.

I also share my home with my loving partner, his 19-year-old brother, a very fluffy Samoyed named Yeti, a 14-year-old cat named Simon who has seen things, and two kittens (Grimm and Calcifer) who have not yet learned that they are small. There is never a quiet moment, and I wouldn't change a thing.

That's also, honestly, part of why I write. Too much of what happens in research labs never makes it past the journal paywall, and even when it does, it often arrives stripped of the context, stakes, and sheer weirdness that would make a normal person actually care. I write about neuroscience, chronic pain, and the underexplored biology of conditions that don't get nearly enough airtime (screen time?), with the goal of making rigorous science feel as alive on the page as it does at the bench.

If you're here because you're curious about how pain works, how science actually gets made, or why the pancreas is somehow both deeply boring and completely fascinating — welcome. You're exactly who I'm writing for.